Rising income inequalities are widely debated in public and academic discourse. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by proposing a new family of measures of unfair inequality. To do so, we acknowledge that inequality is not bad per se, but that its underlying sources need to be taken...

Are competitive mechanisms perceived as just sources of economic inequality? Perceptions of fairness violations can have severe economic consequences, as they may cause counterproductive behavior such as rulebook slowdowns or quality shading. To analyze fairness perceptions associated with...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....

Meritocratic beliefs are often invoked as justification of inequality. We provide evidence on how meritocratic beliefs are shaped by economic status and how they contribute to the moral justification of inequality. In a large-scale survey experiment in the US, we show that success causes a...

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

Does parental wealth inequality impact next generation labor income inequality? And does a tax on parental wealth affect the labor income distribution of the next generation? We tackle both questions empirically using detailed intergenerational data from Norway, focusing on effects on wages...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and, thereby, to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...

This paper examines the role of bequests and of taxation on bequests for the distribution of wealth. We investigate a model with overlapping generations and heterogenous households where parents derive utility directly from their bequests. Using the coefficient of variation as the measure of...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

This paper reviews the principal source of India’s wealth distribution statistics, which is constituted by the five decennial Reserve Bank of India National Sample Survey Organization Surveys on Debt and Investment of 1961-62, 1971-72, 1981-82, 1991-92, and 2002-03. The data available are...